In what were arguably the greatest journeys
of discovery ever undertaken, the two unmanned Voyager spacecraft
gave us our first close-up looks at four of the outer planets and
almost 60 moons. What were once points of light in the largest
Earth-based telescopes suddenly became landscapes. As the
Voyagers were reaching the edge of the Solar System, astronomer Carl Sagan
suggested turning their cameras back to take one last picture of the
planet from which they were launched. On
February 14, 1990, from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometers,
Voyager 1 captured this image of our Earth. Here the entire world
fills only 0.12 pixel and appears as a tiny crescent of light.
Because of the reflection of light off the spacecraft, Earth seems
to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special
significance to this small world. But that is just an accident of
geometry and optics. The apparent rays of light are not sunbeams,
but scattering off the camera's optics, a result of pointing it so
close to the Sun. Had the picture been taken a little earlier or a
little later, there would have been no sunbeam highlighting the
Earth. This is how the planets would look to an alien spaceship
approaching the Solar System after a long interstellar voyage. From
this perspective, there seems nothing remarkable about this pale
blue dot. But for us, it's different ...

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's
home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone
you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their
lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident
religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager,
every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,
every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and
father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader",
every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a
mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the
rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in
glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction
of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of
one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of
some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they
are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have
some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point
of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping
cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint
that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

"The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is
nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could
migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the
Earth is where we make our stand.

"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building
experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of
human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and
to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever
known."